Drugs and murder

I wrote a little thing about encountering drugs behind the mini school where I grew up back in the 80’s which triggered some long forgotten memories of the neighborhood and what it was like. 

I grew up on the block of the mini school and we’d find some vials behind it when going after a foul ball or if the football took a weird bounce after an incomplete pass.  Vials and used condoms weren’t exactly prevalent but they were definitely there.  The elementary school that the mini school was a part of was one block away and significantly bigger.  It took up a small city block with the right half more as park space and the left half as the actual school building.  The right half had a full basketball court with what we called the pyramid behind the furthest hoop.  The pyramid was a cylindrical concrete structure that had steps cut into it every 18” or so.   It could have been more than 6’ tall at its flat peak.  Behind the pyramid was a handball wall, which has nothing do with anything relating to the story but more for you to get a sense of space.  A good 20’ before the hoop closest to the street was the chicken pit.  The chicken pit was strange even to us kids back then.  It felt out of the gladiator days.  A three or four foot drop into sand with concrete walls all around.  It was what you’d expect to find in camps where the kids fight each other to the death.  It was strange because if you were small enough to be intrigued by playing in the sand there was no way for you to get in or out.  Unlike today the playground equipment of the olden days NYC factored more with what could be done affordably and less with safety in mind.  So there was no ladder or any other way in or out of the chicken pit outside of jumping in and climbing out.   What I would imagine was installed for safety was some railing outside of the chicken pit so no one would walk right into the hole. 

Keep in mind that this elementary school only went up to 3^rd or 4^th grade so we are dealing with kids ranging from 5 to 8 or 9.  We’d hardly use the chicken pit as kids.  The sand was dirty and really after your initial use the novelty would wear off and it would be largely ignored outside of a marker for foot races which was tantamount in the hierarchy of 7 and 8 year olds jockeying for status.  Anyway, I remember one morning making my way to the main school building and seeing a small crowd of kids by the pit and seeing the yellow and black police tape all around the railing.  There were a couple of syringes down in the sand and come to think of it something worse must have gone down since the caution tape was put up but the evidence was still there.  I remember thinking that it was a cool thing, mainly because it was out of the ordinary but it didn’t have any impact on our days outside of the chicken pit being shut down either by an order or de facto since no one wanted to go down there. 

The scarier thing that had happened one morning on my way to the main building so I couldn’t have been more than 8 involved the pyramid.  I don’t remember if I saw it or if my brain put together a mental picture.  School started around 8 so we would have to get there by 7:45 to line up and get ready to go into the building.  Getting to school early was another weird source of cache between the kids.  On some level it had to do with hanging out and being kids, meaning busting on each other, saying things we believed were true but with only the limited understanding that kids have.  I would always try to get to school as early as possible in an effort to be cool but living a block away and having responsible adults around me wouldn’t really let that happen.  On this one day we were walking to the main building and see a large amount of people, police cars and tape all by the pyramid.  Apparently only an hour or so before hand someone was shot, (if memory serves over a drug deal gone bad but I’m not sure) and spread out crucifix style with their head on the top of the pyramid and their arms and legs on the steps.  Looking back on it with adult perspective, I don’t remember the teachers mentioning it or being visibly shaken by it.  I definitely remember that school wasn’t cancelled or any other deviation from the norm. 

I’m trying to reconcile whether it was because New York was tougher back in the day or if we’ve become more understanding of how trauma effects people these days.  It’s strange to think about either incident, the syringes or the body, causing a massive uproar by everyone these days.  Maybe it had to do with more of an immigrant population, maybe because so many people were doing drugs and getting killed in new york back then that it wasn’t seen as such a big deal.  I don’t know but do I know we’ve most certainly changed as a society. 

Work and shit

Being unemployed has caused a lot of my conversations and thoughts lately to be about work and working.   Whether or not work is inherent to being human or if it’s been an advent of society in an effort for people with the means to not have to work.  On a far more base level, I got into a conversation about when we each started working and my knee jerk answer has always been that I started working at 16 setting up an archive file room for an environmental company.  That’s not completely accurate though.  Thinking back on it a little bit more I remembered that I had done some entry-level office work for a few days at 13 or 14 but even before that I was a super of sorts. At 12 or so the building we were living in was sold and the new owner didn’t feel like making the trip over twice a week to pick up the garbage cans so he offered me something like $20 a week.   On top of picking up garbage cans I had sweep out the four floors and keep the front of the connected building swept and clean. The building also had a backyard, which wasn’t so much a back yard as it was concrete blocks and a wild overgrown assortment of weeds.  They might not have all been weeds but being a city kid I have no idea what the difference is between weeds and non-weeds.  Now what’s relevant to the story isn’t the back yard but rather how you got to the back yard. 

I’ll do my best to describe the building.  If you were facing the entrance-way you’d see two stone steps which led to a double door to a foyer where the mail boxes were. To the left of the entrance way was an iron gate that rounded to the doorway.  To the right there were the same iron gates except that at the end there was a swinging gate, which lead down to a tunnel, which brought you to a shared space with the connected building next door and then up five or six steps which then led to the backyard. 

To go off topic for a minute, we lived on the first floor and right by those 5 or 6 steps, which led to the backyard was the small window of our bathroom.  The apartment was a two bedroom laid out in a straight line.  As you walked in you’d be in a hallway with the bathroom greeting you.  If you headed left you’d hit the kitchen and then my room, which faced the backyard.  If you headed right you’d hit the living room and then through a set of French doors my mom’s room, which faced the street.  The bathroom had only a small window and up until this one night we would keep it open to vent out the steam that would build up after using the shower.  The shower wasn’t very big and my mom would put the hair products on the shelf directly in front of the window.  From the ground the window had to be a good 6 feet high.  Well, one night we were all woken up to a series of tapping.  Tap, tap.  Tap, tap.  Tap, tap. I don’t remember if I woke up from the tapping or from my mom screaming but in either case the situation became clear.  Someone had jumped and hung off the ledge of the bathroom window and while holding themselves up they started to move the various shampoo and conditions bottles away from the 24” window in an effort to climb in.  Thankfully mom’s screaming scared or startled them enough to jump down and run away. 

I think you get a sense of how secluded the area back there was.  To get back to the work part of the story, I’m sweeping up outside and making my way to the tunnel to finish up and earn that sweet $20 and then I smell it and see it.  I don’t remember if there was a no pets policy in the building or if people just didn’t have pets and at the same time the neighborhood didn’t really have dogs around.  I make my way down the stairs and there it is, shit.  Human shit.  How my 12 year old mind was so convinced that it was human I’m not sure.  Maybe because of the lack of dogs, maybe the size, I’m not sure.  I am sure that I was horrified and disgusted that someone could do that.  I might have stopped being the super in training after that incident because I was so horrified.  Now this memory came flooding back during this conversation and my adult brain definitely saw it very differently than my kid brain.  I relived a small portion of the disgust but then my thoughts were of what kind o situation that person must have been in.  Were they homeless?  Were they on drugs?  Was this alley a godsend?  A place of hidden from the street where they could have some privacy as they tended to a base need in a time of need. 

Drugs were around the neighborhood.  We used to play in a parking lot, which was in front of a small annex of classrooms for the elementary school a block away.  The school and the lot was called “the mini-school.”  The back of the mini-school was a little scarier since it was darker and there was significantly less space than there was in the front area.  I remember finding small vials and condoms when a ball would inevitably make its way around to the back and the older kids would make me go and get it.  I like to think I was a street savvy kid but I’m pretty sure I was still fairly ignorant about these things.  Even if I had a base level understanding that they fell into the categories of drugs and sex, I definitely didn’t have a handle on the logistics or details of them.  On some level all of these things probably factored into my knee jerk reaction of thinking the shit was a person’s, but now I’m thinking of the neighborhood as a whole and how during the 80’s and early 90’s where else would do you do things but not out in the streets in the most secluded of areas.